FGV-SP Administração 2015/2

ELECTRONIC BOOKS AND PRINTED BOOKS

By James Surowiecki

[1]   As a recent report from the Codex Group showed, looking around bookstores is still a far more common way of finding new books than either online search or social media. In fact, independent bookstores are now thriving, thanks in large part to their close ties to both publishers and customers. “Stores that can help you not just find what you’re looking for but also help you discover books you haven’t heard of are still very valuable to readers,” says Daniel Raff, a management professor at Wharton.

[2]   Of course, a lot of people believe that physical books are “technologically obsolete,” and that the book industry is heading down the path that the music industry took, where digital downloads decimated CD sales and put record stores out of business. It’s true that, between 2009 and 2011, ebook sales rose at triple-digit annual rates. But last year, according to industry trade groups, e-book sales rose just forty-four per cent. (They currently account for about a fifth of the total market.) This kind of deceleration in the growth rate isn’t what you’d expect if e-books were going to replace printed books anytime soon. In a recent survey by the Codex Group, ninety-seven per cent of people who read e-books said that they were still loyal to print, and only three per cent of frequent book buyers read only digital.

[3]  E-books obviously have certain advantages (like the fact that you can carry lots of them around with you), but for many book buyers their main appeal is that they’re cheaper. Against that, the Codex Group finds that people of all ages still prefer print for serious reading; e-book sales are dominated by genre fiction—“light reading.” This may be just a prejudice that will vanish as e-books become more common. But we do read things differently when they’re on a page rather than on a screen. A study this year found that people reading on a screen tended to skip around more and read less intensively, and plenty of research confirms that people tend to comprehend less of what they read on a screen. The differences are small, but they may explain the persistent appeal of paper. Indeed, hardcover book sales rose last year by a hundred million dollars.

[4]  For many people, as a number of studies show, reading is a genuinely tactile experience—how a book feels and looks has a material impact on how we feel about reading. This isn’t necessarily traditionalism or nostalgia. The truth is that the book is an exceptionally good piece of technology— easy to read, portable, durable, and inexpensive. Unlike the phase-change move toward digital that we saw in music, the transition to e-books is going to be slow; coexistence is more likely than conquest. The book isn’t obsolete.

Adapted from The New Yorker, July 29, 2013.